Oklahoma OK

Shortly before I was born, my father got two jobs: one in the R&D Department of Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, and the other as a professor at the University of Oklahoma. He took the former because he refused to live in a city without a professional sports team.

1) The study was funded by a conservative institution. I’m sure that they are just as disappointed in the outcome as the liberals are. Seems the very definition of bi-partisan.

2) There is an even an error in the correct answers. The two parties are not “Democrat and Republican” as the key says, they are “Democratic and Republican.” That error (though minor) shows the from which political bias it is from.

3) Court packing among progressives? The last time that happened was under F.D.R. and, if you bother to read the history behind that event, that as an incident he would later regret.

4) Looking at the current list of justices, we see that only three out of nine were nominated under a Democratic president (Ginsberg, Breyer and Sotomayor. The most “liberal” justice on the court, Stevens, was nominated by Ford). If court packing is being done on the Supreme Court, it has been done, during my lifetime, solely by the Republican party.

5) There is an insane amount of documentation that court packing, based on political affiliation, has been solely the purview of the Republican Party. There is no evidence of court packing based on affiliation among the other party—though, as I pointed out above, there was court-packing done by FDR in order to get the political outcomes he liked, which is different. Measuring and considering the political affiliation of justices is a relatively recent phenomena. I’d have to say the first incident would probably be the Bork nomination which was sabotaged by the Democratic congress—though looking at Bork’s later statements, it’d be hard to take defense that having Bork on the Supreme Court would have been good for the country… good luck trying to prove Bork didn’t deserve to be Borked).

7) The largest “judicial activism” in the history of the Supreme Court occurred, not under the Warren court (which has been synonymous with the word), but actually during the Reinquist (conservative, previous) Supreme Court. Since “progressivism” is the opposite of “conservatism,” I find that ironic. (BTW, the reason this has happened has been the introduction of court-packing the bench based on “movement conservatism” which reached its nadir (or zenith, depending on your perspective) under the last administration.

8) I have never had the opportunity to personally pack the Supreme Court with progressives, and never will. Given the youth of some of the people on the Supreme Court with views I feel are out of step with where America is headed, I suppose I won’t see a Supreme Court that reflects my views for about thirty years. (Though at the rate the Republican party and demographics are diverging, it looks like this will be a foregone conclusion.)

9) As for “making fun of people” you realize that a friend of mine, who recently became a U.S. citizen, had no trouble going 10 for 10 on this quiz, right? I got a 10 out of 10, I assume you would have too.